Monday, February 13, 2006

What's Wrong WIth This Picture - PART 2

No prize for the winner except world-wide fame and no small dose of envy from the multitudes who visit this blog regularly.

Check out #6 on their "Top Ten Reasons to try us":

No boxes!God can blow the lid off any box, unfold it and turn it into a dance floor. We tend to be the “out of the box” people. Among our many firsts, we were the first mainline church to take a stand against slavery (1700), the first to ordain an African American person (1785), the first to ordain a woman (1853), the first in foreign missions (1810), and the first to ordain openly gay lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons (1972). We value education for all people. We founded Harvard and Yale, as well as many historically black colleges, six of which remain affiliated with the UCC to this day.

5 comments:

...on a further note:In reason number 5, they write that "baptism is big enough".

Baptism is a demonstration of identification with and submission to the work of Christ on the cross by His death burial and resurrection. It's not about quantity, it's about quality; and this quality is not our quality, but the fact that only Christ was good enough to undo Adam's sin and buy His people out of bondage. The name of the denomination is misleading. Aside from using a Satanic quote, they come to the issue baptism and focus on the people doing whatever they want instead of submitting to the Lordship of Christ after whom they name themselves. By focusing on quantity, they dodge the promise of condemnation for unrepentant sinners that is the antithesis of the promise of salvation evident in baptism.

Someone contacted them and they changed it. In the first block of text, the church says this:

Welcome to St. James United Church of Christ! . . . For those of you who were kind enough to inform us about our previously inaccurate quote...we thank you!

The original banner had these words: "If thou wilt fall down and worship me, thou wilt have all you ask" or something like that. They quoted the words of Satan when the devil was tempting Jesus in the wilderness.